The boys deserve a better chance at school as well as in life

Next month, I will announce the funding of 30 school clusters across Australia to be working models of an ideal approach to boys in different educational settings.

Australia needs also to address the serious gender imbalance in the teaching workforce.

Only one in five primary teachers is a male and only 16 per cent of those in training are men.

A significant minority of boys are getting from birth to high school without a significant male role model in their lives.

Though the teachers' union described as a "myth" the feminisation of teaching and schools, a primary school whose only male is the gardener is good for neither girls nor boys.

We will do our country a great disservice if we produce a generation of men leaving school disengaged, disillusioned and ill-prepared for relationships and life.

Young men today are tethered still to the values of my generation which told us in all kinds of ways that we should expect to do better than our parents - better job, bigger house and higher standard of living.

In a country that still largely defines people through their work and that for a generation has told kids in all kinds of ways that success is an outstanding UAI, university education, BMW, mobile phone and fashionable clothes, is it any wonder many young men feel there is no place for them?

We need - as parents and leaders - to reassure them that their inherent worth as human beings is not determined by their educational and career choices.

Apprenticeships, TAFE and jobs are first-rate options.

The contemporary stereotypes of masculinity paraded before them should not be confined to athletes and rock musicians

Perhaps the greatest gift will be to show them how to avoid loneliness, that what they will need most in their lives is one another.